Introducing Jadwiga Maurer's Biography as Writer and Scholar

Abstract The goal of this article is to present an outline biography of the writer who spent most of her adult life on university campuses in the US and whose prose works, highly regarded in émigré literary circles, had not, for a variety of questionable reasons, achieved the status of mainstream authors of the postwar Polish diaspora. The article emphasizes Jadwiga Maurer's affiliation with the vast canon of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical literary testimonies by Jewish authors who experienced the Holocaust in childhood or on the cusp of adulthood; the article also discusses the distinctiveness of her place in this canon. That distinctiveness has its source in the circumstances of her wartime ordeal and later experience, as well as in the originality of her writing talent.